X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014::Ellen’s famous ‘most retweeted’ selfie from the 2014 Oscars has had its image restored, but most old tweets have broken short links instead of the media or links that should be there.
Twitter, X, or whatever it’s currently called, did not respond to requests for comment.
The Verge is fed up lol
I figure they would at least mention the poop emoji auto reply.
They got rid of it.
Charitable assumption.
It probably broke.
No, they changed it to, “We’ll get back to you soon.” sometime after the new CEO came on board. Of course they never “get back to you soon”. So, it might as well be a poop emoji.
might be best not to encourage that behavior
Yet they are still at nazitter. If they were really fed up, they could do something about it.
Wtf is a nazitter
Looks to be a portmanteau of nazi and twitter.
Thank you. I legit did not see that in my brain when I read the word.
“Glitch”
Time to cut some storage costs!
This is exactly it. It also wouldn’t surprise me if certain accounts had images from then that might get request by law enforcement that are now “oops all gone!”
Someone noticed it knocked out most of the Arab Spring. Remember who also owns part of Twitter?
They can’t be that much of a burden surely?
That, or he wasn’t even paying the bill and everything finally got wiped.
More like can’t cancel me for something I said in 2012 if there’s no record of it.
Now it’s a “Xlitch”
Is anyone still on twitter? Why?
Because of this fucking online press embedding tweets into every article, even weather reports
Momentum. It’s still the most popular platform for many niches and it will stay popular as long as it’s popular…
And English speakers are only a fraction of the user base. Current events in the US social media bubble barely penetrate the general public in the US, let alone across international and language barriers.
It’s probably the largest social media platform in Japan, for example.
It's probably the largest social media platform in Japan, for example.Really? 😯 I’m surprised they don’t have a local solution, that’s interesting!
Also reach and variety of users. Bussiness and self-employed people need it.
I think you overestimate the user base.
Unless you happen to be in one of the countries or niches where Twitter is really popular, you won’t reach a relevant amount of people on there.
That goes without saying, I mean in places like the US/UK/Japan etc, it’s useful. Many artists almost depended on it.
“It will stay popular as long as it’s popular…”
You dont say? Yall are making it popular. If you y’all stopped using it, then it will not be popular and it would die.
I haven’t deleted my account - it’s 17 years old! But I also haven’t posted in a couple months other than saying I’ve moved to Mastodon. I said I’d hold on to the bitter end & I will. I’m not leaving, they’ll have to evict me.
I’m not leaving, they’ll have to evict me.
But… Why?
It’s the principle of the thing. I’m not going to delete myself, pretend I wasn’t there for all those years. The record stands. (Except for any media posted prior to 2014, which now exists only on my personal cloud storage, I guess.)
More power to you I guess, I think our brains just work differently on this subject. I used TweetDelete and nuked my entire account a few months back. I was going to let it just sit there with no activity but then he did another stupid thing (I forget which thing) so I wanted my content completely off the platform.
Perfectly understandable.
I can’t speak for the previous comment but in my case they wanted me to remove 2fa (or pay to keep it) just to log in
I didn’t remove it, and I’ve never been back
shitposting mostly
Haha, “glitch” about $10 million dollars in storage fee was cleared.
Anyone still using Twitter is a top tier masochist. It was always a pretty shit platform, but it’s being made fun of by the toilet and the dumpster now for how shitty it is.
Hell, I think the sewage treatment plant is starting to blush at this point.
The images are still available. The redirects are broken.
So how do I get the direct links if all the tweets have the short link?
Elon has begun his long game of erasing the past.
It’s more that finally it starts to show how stupid firing most of the staff was
Most people in tech anticipated it to run fine for a while but then eventually stuff like this will show up more often because you don’t have people that actually understand the code anymore and which kind of side-effects to think about with changes
To zoom out even more: It’s just one more incident showing how fragile investor-sustained digital information systems are.
Every website that came before the current crop of mega-scale privacy-invading behemoths also failed, and took down all their user data and history with them. Why would anyone expect Twitter to be any different?
My Geocities page :(
Doubleplusgoof
Man, if it wasn’t a typo I’d think you’re a fucking genius, that’s a really witty one
I’m gonna steal that for all the times fascists go “oops, looks like I accidentally further fucked up society, wow I’m so clumsy haha totally accidental”
Eh. This is on us. URL shorteners and Twitter in particular have always been scarily brittle and opaque,. With nobody actively maintaining the data, why would you think that it would be around forever?
Exactly. It’s always been likely to be broken by someone at some point. Url shorteners are a thing mostly because of twitters original character limit. Or at least that’s when they gained popularity.
Maybe we’re just blissfully naïve and possibly twelve years old. It’s so hard to tell on the internet.
3-2-1 Rule:
3 copies of the data.
2 Different media types.
1 of those off-site.If you’re relying on Twitter as the only place you have an image you care about, you’re making a bad choice.
I don’t think that’s the point.
I don’t think anybody seriously used twitter as storage.
Rather the point is that, similarly to every time a blogging platform or another online service with user content shuts down, a bit of internet history disappears with it. Links are broken, traces of opinions or bits of knowledge from another time are not available anymore…
It’s not the end of the world, and at that point I wouldn’t really care if twitter disappeared completely overnight, but still, some stuff will be lost.
Donate to the Internet Archive, y’all.
I’m not sure “Twitter is not a backup service for your personal hard drive” is a point that needed to be made.
Have you met an average Internet user? It certainly might.
I thought Archiveteam would have been on it. Seems not. Though according to their wiki even the US library of congress gave up on a complete archive, so probably not a low effort errand.
I am kinda without words, need to check if one of my favorite post are still up. The poet was made by a trans women before she knew she was trans. She was sitting in a boat and said I feel like a girl in a 90s movie. She quote posted it recently and said we made it girlie.
If it went viral, it might be in the Wayback Machine. ᴰᵒⁿᵃᵗᵉ ᵗᵒ ᵗʰᵉ ᵂᵃʸᵇᵃᶜᵏ ᴹᵃᶜʰᶦⁿᵉ ᵃⁿᵈ ᴵⁿᵗᵉʳⁿᵉᵗ ᴬʳᶜʰᶦᵛᵉᵎ
wtf is wrong with your Ns?
Link to the post?
“Glitch”
Sure, a “glitch”. More like further last ditch efforts to keep Twitter alive by cutting any costs necessary.
Erasing media of the Arab Spring at the behest of his Saudi handlers.
Woopsie
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s unclear when the problem started, but it was highlighted on Saturday afternoon in a post by Tom Coates, and a Brazilian vtuber, @DaniloTakagi, had pointed it out a couple of days earlier.
As it is, it appears to affect tweets published prior to December 2014, judging by posts visible on my own account.
On Saturday afternoon, as Coates pointed out, the glitch claimed the picture from one of the most famous tweets ever (back when they were still called tweets), this selfie posted by 2014 Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres flanked by celebs like Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and others, taken during the show’s broadcast.
I haven’t seen any public comments from owner Elon Musk or X CEO Linda Yaccarino about the problem, but at some point on Saturday night / early Sunday morning, the picture in that post was restored.
Despite speculation that it could be an intentional cost-cutting move by Musk, the fact that the actual media posted hasn’t been deleted suggests an error or bug of some kind, one of many that have arisen since last year’s takeover and mass layoffs.
There’s also at least one other old tweeted image that still worked — the one posted to President Barack Obama’s account after winning his 2012 campaign for reelection, showing a hug between him and the First Lady.
The original article contains 394 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 44%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot
Trying to decide if I care enough to check my account that I started in like 2009 and haven’t looked at since probably 2012. After everything that has happened I almost feel like it would be impressive if it still existed.
At this point, I guess he is the most Mastodon support of all time, damn. He is really trying hard to make people quit his platform
That’s very privacy friendly of them ;)
